Chuck Levin's Riff 'n' Ready Charm

Add to this the insistent interruption of the public intercom: "Band sales, line 2 please." And then, reminding you that this is a family business after all, Mom calls: "Alan, Mrs. Levin on 1. Alan, Mrs. Levin on 1, please."

All in the Family

Chuck and Marge Levin, then in the pawnshop business, opened the Music Center in 1958 at 12th and H streets downtown. It lasted there for 10 years, and then there were the riots.

Brown, a teenage horn player then, remembers defying his police officer father by going down to check out the damage with some other music students. "Going through the alleys, there were drumheads on the ground. Walking through them, it was like potato chips, crispy, burned up by the fire," he says. "Folks around had guitars, instruments and stuff. It really bothered us because they had no right to have that stuff. It was so precious to us, they had no idea what they had."

With shipments in transit being rerouted to his house, Levin settled on an empty furniture showroom on Veirs Mill Road in Wheaton as the store's new location. In the way of family businesses, the place has become the physical embodiment of one family's life together.

Marge, now mostly retired, was a fixture behind the register, den mother to a thousand sons. "My father was the business side, she was the soft side," says Robert Levin. He now runs the place with his brother, Alan, 53, who started wiping down the store's glass counters when he was 13, went full time at 18, and has worked there six days a week ever since, never living more than three miles away, never marrying.

Their sister, Abbe, 51, though substantially less involved, also pitches in when needed.

Robert recalls, "When my parents were away and Alan was here alone, I would drive home from school, and he actually hired somebody to type my paper as I was writing it, working the cash register." Robert, 47, escaped the force field long enough to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, but not a day longer. "I asked for two weeks off, and then the guy who was kind of like the store manager at the time, he left the day I graduated. . . . I lost my weeks off."

Where the Stars Shop

Yes, yes, yes, you gossipmongers -- famous people have shopped at Chuck's. Stevie Wonder is one. "Whenever he's in town, it seems, he'll stop in. You talk about somebody with the gravitational pull of a neutron star," Schein says. "The store looks like a boat wake, all these people start following in a V-shaped pattern."

Foreign rulers too. The British Embassy called to say that Cherie Blair wanted to buy a guitar for her husband (the PM got a Taylor acoustic). Idi Amin's people "said they needed all these small drums for pygmies." ("You asked. I'm telling you," says Alan.)

Then there's the local talent. "I've got 11 guitars, and six I bought from Chuck's," says Chuck Brown, Washington's own godfather of go-go, who bought his first guitar, a Gibson, from the Music Center in 1963 and his last one there just four or five years ago. "I gave one to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one to the Smithsonian and one to the Library of Congress. That's three of Chuck's guitars that I've donated."

The Music Center has even grown its very own rock star: Chris Culos, drummer for the rock band O.A.R., to whom Chuck Levin was "Uncle Chuck" and whose father, Carl, has worked at the store for 27 years.

"We were in such a fortunate position," Culos says of his band's connection to the store during their Wootton High School days. "In the beginning, we didn't know what we were doing, what equipment we needed. . . . We would book on a random offer. Maybe we got an offer to play in a small little bar that night. Maybe they don't even have a sound system.